Building Envelope Design

Building Envelope plays a key role in determining the required energy for cooling, heating, and lighting of buildings. Proper building envelope design can strongly save energy and enhance indoor environment and occupants’ comfort. Energy modeling is a very powerful tool to simulate energy behavior in the buildings and the effect of the building design in the energy interaction with the surrounding. This allows designers to make alterations to the building design or operation while simultaneously monitoring the impact on system behavior and performance.

Energy modeling of building envelope in residential buildings form architectural and structural perspectives can increase the energy efficiency of these buildings and reduce the

Improving energy efficiency of the building by use highly insulated window has been performed by several studies and researches.

Nikoofard, et al. [1] performed a simulation for a building model for a house in Canada with different design alternatives. The researchers found that using low E coated double glazing window with Argon filled instead of ordinary single glazing can save up to 53% of the heating loads and

24.4% of the cooling loads for the building model when simulating it at different locations in Canada.

Moorjani & Asadi [2] performed a study to investigate the effect of using different types of glazing on optimized window dimensions and layout in an office room. They showed that using the optimal dimensions for the windows and highly insulated windows can significantly reduce the energy demands for the simulated model. For the effect of the infiltration rate of the energy consumption in the buildings, Emmerich &

Persily [3] have performed a study to estimate the energy use in commercial buildings due

The largest portion of the consumed energy was from electricity; residential buildings consumption of electric energy in 2012 was equal to

566.55 GWh or 487323 toe which represented 40% of the total electric energy consumed in Jordan.

Awwad & Sakhrieh [5] conducted a study to determine the feasibility of adopting energy efficiency measures and applications in the housing buildings in Jordan. They found that consumed energy in building in Jordan can be reduced by proper window design, using insulation materials and by implementing renewable energy system. Jaber & Ajib [6] performed an assessment of best orientation of the building, windows size, thermal insulation thickness from the energetic, economic and environmental point of view for typical residential building in Jordan. The results of this assessment showed that 27.59% of annual energy consumption can be saved by choosing best orientation, the optimum size of windows and shading device, and optimum insulation thickness.

In this research, energy modeling for building in early design stage has been performed to predict the energy demands over a specified time period for a residential building located in